Egyptian protesters face anti-riot policemen in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Jan. 28, 2011. The Egyptian capital Cairo was the scene of violent chaos Friday, when tens of thousands of anti-government protesters stoned and confronted police, who fired back with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons. It was a major escalation in what was already the biggest challenge to authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak's 30 year-rule.

Photo: Victoria Hazou, Associated Press

Egyptian protesters face anti-riot policemen in Cairo, Egypt,...

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AFP PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2011
Egyptian anti-government bloggers work on their laptops from Cairo's Tahrir square on February 10, 2011 on the 17th day of consecutive protests calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.. AFP PHOTO/PATRICK BAZ (Photo credit should read PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Photo: Patrick Baz, Getty

AFP PICTURES OF THE YEAR 2011
Egyptian anti-government bloggers...

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Egyptian protesters celebrate atop a captured police troop carrier during demonstrations in Cairo on Jan. 28, 2011. After a day of increasingly violent protests throughout Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered the military into the streets late Friday to reinforce police struggling to contain one of the most serious challenges to his long and autocratic rule. (Scott Nelson/The New York Times)

So here I am, an Arab journalist in Silicon Valley, where 4 out of every 4 people I meet believe Facebook invented the Arab Spring. Three more weeks here, and I might start to hallucinate that Mark Zuckerberg was a Cairo-slums native whose actual name is Hassouna Al-Fatatri, who rotted in a Mubarak prison for advocating personal privacy rights.

The tools Arabs used were not mainly Google, Facebook or Twitter. They were simply their own I-revolt apps.

One of the most potent native tools in organizing mass protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen and, occasionally, other Arab countries was not Facebook or Twitter but "Friday-book dot come rally now." If that doesn't ring a bell, just Google "Friday of Rage," "Friday of Liberation" or the "Friday of Departure," among many other Fridays.

Friday noon prayers, where hundreds and sometimes thousands of people customarily gather every week, have been the most shared feature of the Arab Spring uprisings. The weekly congregations were in fact the main hub for bringing protesters out to the streets - not because of their spiritual value but because of their ability to gather people with no or little extra effort. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the Internet in general may have helped some of the initial rallying calls in Egypt, a nation of 85 million people, for the Jan. 25 protest. But it was Friday, Jan. 28, that saw the birth of the real revolution in Egypt and the subsequent domino effect in other countries.

Fridays were not a reason. They were just an I-revolt app - a good, handy one. A second ergonomic, user-friendly, Arab-gadget was the good old A-4 white-paper flyer, handwritten or, rarely, typed, designating places to assemble and protest. That one was a favorite of leaders of the labor movement in Mahala Al-Kobra, home of Egypt's important textiles industry, and of disgruntled maritime workers on the Suez Canal. Threats of labor strikes were instrumental in bringing the military - which was fearful of a complete country shutdown - to eventually side with the people in Egypt.

Another tool I saw employed to keep the fervor going was simple word of mouth over landline telephones from mostly panicky family members reporting to their loved ones how egregious Hosni Mubarak's brutal ways had become. You add to that mix the role played by the 24-hour pan-Arab TV news, especially from the Mubarak-bashing Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, in spreading the word, and you'll get a realistic sense of what a limited role social media outlets had on the ground.

In fact, the entire Internet was made useless when Mubarak cut off all communications, but that did not dent people's ability to plan and organize one bit.

The Facebook claims do not explain, either, why there is no sign of revolt or even political activism in the United Arab Emirates, which, according to the Dubai School of Government, in December 2010 had the highest Facebook penetration rate in the Arab region, 45 percent. On the eve of the revolution, Egypt's rate was 5 percent.

Now, in Syria and Yemen, with a much lower Internet penetration, protests are raging like wildfire. And it is not Facebook that's gathering them. It's the local software, such as Friday congregations, word of mouth, flyers, telephone landlines, family relations and television. The videos on YouTube and social networking sites are important indeed, but only for documenting what is happening and letting the outside world know. That, however, hasn't mattered much.

Western capitals had initially slumbered through the Tunisian revolution until ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was at the door. When Western powers finally noticed, in a way thanks to social media, their initial knee-jerk reaction was to try to keep Stooge 0.1 Ben Ali and Stooge 0.2 Mubarak from crashing.

So, for now, to get an accurate analysis and subsequently helpful policy recommendations about the Arab Spring, Western institutions need to take a deep breath, have the courage to admit failures, stop trying to take credit for something they didn't do and look hard and deep into what really happened in the Arab region.

It was, for sure, the Friday-book, not Facebook.

Emad Mekay is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He worked for the New York Times, Bloomberg News and Inter Press Service in the Middle East. He is the founder of America In Arabic News Agency. He covered most of the initial protests of the Arab Spring for the International Herald Tribune and for Inter Press Service. Send your feedback to us through our online form at sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1